HGST recognized as a niche player for distributed file systems and object storage

HGST, a Western Digital Corp, with its ActiveScale object storage family of data center systems, has been recognized by Gartner in its 2017 Magic Quadrant for Distributed File Systems and Object Storage.

The company was recognized for its completeness of vision and ability to execute.

Phil Bullinger, Western Digital GM of data center systems says, “In today's enterprise and cloud-scale data centers, there is growing demand to deploy scalable storage architectures that deliver high data integrity and long-term data management at a much lower cost for an expanding range of Big Data and Fast Data applications.

“Our ActiveScale System provides the foundation for 'Data Forever' environments, simplifying the management of unstructured data for Big Data analytics, backup and archive.

“By offering easy-to-deploy software-defined storage systems, we enable our users to shift their focus and investments from infrastructure to extracting value from data, so that they can be more competitive."

According to the Gartner report, with data growth exceeding 50% year over year, infrastructure and operations (I&O) leaders are looking for extensible on-premises storage products that can address an increasing number of digital business use cases with lower acquisition and operational costs.

The report further notes that by 2021, more than 80% of enterprise data will be stored in scale-out storage systems in enterprise and cloud data centers, up from 30 percent today.

Western Digital believes it is imperative that enterprises deploy a flexible and scalable solution, like the ActiveScale System, to manage their vast amount of data.

Bullinger added, "We are honoured to be recognized by Gartner.

“We feel Western Digital is disrupting the economics of data with our ActiveScale object storage system that is well-suited for petabyte (PB)-scale deployments."

The HGST-branded ActiveScale system is a fully self-contained, scale-out object storage system that rivals the scale and total cost of ownership (TCO) benefits of traditional cloud infrastructures.

It scales up to 5.8 petabytes (PB) of raw data storage in a single rack and scales out to more than 52PB (raw) to support the growth and scale of even the largest enterprises and cloud service providers.

The ActiveScale system helps customers implement a 'Data Forever' strategy that delivers the seamless scalability and extreme data durability required for long-term data storage, across generations of hardware technology.

Its patented BitSpread dynamic data placement technology adapts to changes in the configuration, hardware failures, or additional capacity without impacting operations, and without rebalancing.